You may not believe many moments in "Touch," but you may want to by the tearjerker end of the pilot episode, airing Wednesday on Fox.

Created by Tim Kring ("Heroes") as a vehicle for Kiefer Sutherland ("24"), "Touch" uses the story of a single dad and his young son to suggest that because all of creation is based on the same mathematical formulas, if we could only learn to interpret the interconnections, it would be possible to foretell events.

Sutherland plays Martin Bohm, a former newspaper reporter who has bounced from job to job trying to care for his son, Jake (David Mazouz), left in his sole care after the death of his wife in the 2001 World Trade Center attack. Jake does not speak, nor will he allow anyone to touch him. He spends hours and hours writing repetitive numerical sequences and playing with old cell phones his father brings home from his current job as an airport baggage handler.

Martin loves his son, but strains against the frustrations of trying to raise him on his own. He sends him to a special school, but even there, Jake seems to exist in a private world and even wandered off, only to be found atop a nearby cell phone tower. After that, social worker Clea Hopkins (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is sent to determine whether Jake should be institutionalized. Martin seeks advice from an academic named Arthur DeWitt (Danny Glover), who has studied children who have an odd thing for numbers and who convinces him that Jake is trying to communicate, in his own way.

So far, so ... well, melodramatic. But that's OK: We get that Martin loves his son and would do anything to get through to him or at least be able to hold him. But in keeping with the premise of the show, there are multiple stories in the pilot episode, all tangentially linked, at first, by a cell phone that manages to travel around the world after being lost at Heathrow Airport. Each person who finds the phone adds another layer to the interlinked stories, but how do the stories connect to Martin and Jake? The answer may cause gasps and a few tears, or perhaps a big shrug of incredulity.

Yes, to a large extent "Touch" is pretty much like CBS' "Numb3rs" with more schmaltz. But it bears a more intriguing similarity to another current CBS show, "Person of Interest." That series' gimmick is a supersecret machine that crunches data to predict when seemingly random individuals will be involved in violence, as either victims or perpetrators. J.J. Abrams only needs a flashy weekly introduction to explain how Michael Emerson and Jim Caviezel do their thing on "Person" and we easily accept that a supercomputer of this kind could actually exist.

It's a little tougher when the "machine" is a little kid, and it gets more challenging when we're asked to follow links to other characters around the world like one of those serpentine dotted lines in a Family Circus panel.

"Touch" may make your head hurt a little, but it means to appeal to your heart, largely through the relationship between Martin and his son, which earns our primary emotional response. Other responses, though emotional, feel less earned as Kring pushes us to take those leaps of logic in the plot. It's not clear from one episode whether the show's warm and fuzzy message can successfully counterbalance implausibility, but with an order for 13 episodes and the presence of Sutherland in the lead role, Fox is banking that it can.